Engaging or Disengaging Culture?

Recently we were asked the following question (via email) and since then I have been thinking about it some more.

What is your philosophy for engaging culture?

My thoughts: Are we as a church community meant to be engaging our culture in the first place? What I mean by this is, are we meant to be engaging our culture when we meet together ie. creating an environment/space/style that is "acceptable", "inviting" and "comfortable" to an "un-churched" spiritual seeker?

A couple of thoughts we had on this - still needing to be refined of course:

- by creating a culture, I am losing a culture. What I mean by this is, the culture that churches create often becomes a subculture for it's members that causes them to disengage from their existing culture ie. the place where they are already engaged and where salt & light is desperately needed. How much of a Christians life starts to evolve around this church subculture, leaving very little or no time for mission in our existing culture?

- most people, provided they are breathing are already engaged in culture. From the most introverted to the extreme extroverts - a culture is being engaged like it or not. When we get together as a community, are we trying to bring people into OUR culture and convert them, or are we trying to encourage one another in being light and salt to our existing cultures?

- are we wasting valuable time by trying to get others to engage in our church culture? I believe we are. I have been involved in "creating" church culture, it takes time, requires driven leadership and ultimately takes a lot of energy to sustain it and a lot of money to reproduce it.


Having said all this, this was our answer to the top question:

"To be honest, we don't really have one. We believe that each existing community in society has a culture of its own and is already engaging and living in that culture. This is especially true in a country like South Africa where the cultures are extremely diverse. We want to bring the Kingdom of God into each existing community and how they choose to engage their culture is up to them."

Hey, we may be missing the mark completely here, but we would certainly appreciate some of your thoughts on this.